It was Monday, February 10, two days after German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Friedrich Merz, leader of the Christian Democratic Union, sat for a televised debate, posturing, parrying, each trying to claim ground neither had quite earned. Germany’s snap election is set for February 23, under the shadow of a surging far-right – its march less a creep than a charge.

The Alternative für Deutschland is no longer a spectre on the margins. It is here – shaping the conversation, forcing hands, shifting lines once thought uncrossable.

In the university cafeteria, I met Frederik, 23, a philosophy student at Leipzig University. I asked him about the debate. “I think Scholz did well,” he said, “but his party is moving too close to far-right rhetoric on migration. Scholz is proud of the deportations his government has carried out. That is the kind of statement we expect from the CDU or AfD, with their talk of ‘remigration’. He’s helped make migration the issue of this election – even though, in reality, it isn’t.”

During the debate, Merz had seized Scholz’s record on migration and torn it apart with the blunt force of certainty.

Frederik’s friend Jessi, a law student, nodded. “Apparently, they talked about climate for one minute,” she said. “And that’s considered a long time.”

Priorities have shifted, not by accident but by design. Over his three-year term, Scholz has steadily hardened his stance on migration. He does not hesitate to remind the nation of his government’s success in deportations.

“The Chancellor is proud,” Frederik repeated, bitterness in his voice. “Proud of deportations.”

Some of Scholz’s policies have tested the limits of the Schengen Agreement and challenged the European Union’s very foundation of free movement. His pivot came after the far right’s decisive gains in regional elections: 33% in Thuringia, 31% in Saxony. These are fault lines. This is how the far-right governs even without governing.

Firewall that was never built

For a long time, Germany had something the rest of Europe seemed to lack: die Brandmauer – a firewall against the far right. Not a law, not a constitutional clause, just a clear consensus among major parties that the far right AfD was beyond the pale. No cooperation. No validation. No seat at the table for extremism.

That the lessons of German’s Nazi past still meant something. That understanding is now a relic. The wall has cracked.

Friedrich Merz, a right winger businessman who has spent his political career circling the chancellorship like a wolf outside a warm house, made the first crack. He put forward a proposal for stricter migration policies – so strict they bordered on violating the European Union law. In an act of casual betrayal, he sought AfD’s support to push them through the the German parliament, the Bundestag.

“Yes, it may be that the AfD will for the first time make it possible for a necessary law to be passed,” Merz reasoned, “But ladies and gentlemen, we are faced with the choice of continuing to watch helplessly as people in our country are threatened, injured and murdered or to stand up and do what is indisputably necessary in this matter.”

It was a justification – a sentence fit for history books, a neat little turn of phrase, something you could put on a plaque.

One that might appear decades later, footnoted in a chapter titled: How It Began. Again.

But AfD did not need a plaque. They needed an opening. And their candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, did not miss her cue.

“Die Brandmauer ist gefallen!” she tweeted on X. The firewall has fallen.

A visitor, a speech, a pattern

Then, in an act of coincidence, or perfect timing, Elon Musk arrived. A billionaire born in apartheid-era South Africa, with no stake in German history but plenty in its future.

On January 25, he appeared on a mammoth screen before an AfD audience of 4,500 gathered in Halle, a city 30 km from Leipzig, once part of the former German Democratic Republic.

“It’s good to be proud to be a German,” he said. “And not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.”

Multiculturalism. That was the enemy.

He went on: “There is too much focus on past guilt. We need to move beyond that.”

The crowd cheered. The line had landed exactly as it was meant to.

Two days later, European leaders gathered at Auschwitz to mark 80 years since the liberation of the Nazi death camp. They stood in front of cameras. They spoke of remembrance and vigilance, of ensuring the past would not repeat itself. There was silence. There were bowed heads. A reverence that was appropriate.

Back in Germany, however, the irony of it all was not lost on those paying attention.

A reminder, an omen and a choice

Germany, so far Europe’s last stronghold against far-right institutional power, is slipping.

France, under President Macron, had already moved right, hoping to siphon off votes from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. After losing to the far right in the European Union elections of June 2024, Macron called snap elections, believing he could outmanoeuvre her.

It did not work – she surged in the polls anyway.

In Austria, the Freedom Party, founded by former Nazis in 1950s, is poised to take power, set to install its own chancellor for the first time since World War II. The political establishment’s promise to keep the far-right at bay did not hold. It never does.

In the United States, Kamala Harris, anxious about being seen as weak on the border, decided to sound tough on immigration. She repeatedly boasted about being a proud gun owner, failing to recognise that this strategy has never actually stopped the right from gaining ground.

It’s the same pattern, over and over.

A centrist government thinks it can outmanoeuvre the far-right by borrowing its rhetoric. It talks about tough but fair policies, about protecting borders, about security. It does this to reassure voters who might otherwise drift further right. It assumes that by making small concessions, it can hold the centre.

This has never worked.

What happens instead is that the far-right gains legitimacy. Their language, once unspeakable, becomes acceptable. Then it becomes mainstream. Then it becomes law.

Scholz, standing across from Merz in that debate, had a choice. He could have made the case for something else – for solidarity, for rejecting this entire framework. Instead, he talked about deportations.

Every election cycle in Europe, the warnings come: for the first time since World War II...But the phrase is losing its weight. The cycle is repeating, and the distance between then and now is shrinking.

The price of ceding ground

In another time, in another version of this moment, people might have seen the pattern more clearly. They might have looked at the archives, at the footage from the 1930s, at the way a country does not wake up one morning and decide to go numb – it happens in increments, in policy shifts, in small changes that seem unimportant until suddenly they are irreversible.

But it is 2025, and the numbers in the East German states – Saxony and Thuringia suggest that the voters are already doing that math for themselves.

So, people do what they always do: they argue over the technicalities. They discuss polling numbers, coalition-building and the strategies for the next election cycle. They talk about “stopping the AfD” in the same breath as adopting its policies. They repeat, again and again, that the firewall still holds. Because it is easier to say that than to admit it never did.

The media, the political parties, the citizens who believe in liberal democracy must resist the pull toward far-right rhetoric. The illusion of short-term electoral gain is just that: an illusion. They will not win by co-opting these ideas; they will only make it easier for those who believe in them to claim victory. The question, therefore, is not whether history will repeat itself. The question is: will we let it?

The choices are not difficult. The consequences, however, are immeasurable.

Pius Fozan is a photojournalist and public policy graduate from the Willy Brandt School and Central European University.